"I've been programming professionally for about 3 years at this point, and I've noticed some interesting patterns in other programmers I've worked with. One of the key differentiators among programmers is motivation. I'm not referring to an individual's passion to simply be successful in their career, but rather the type of work they want to pursue. The thing they want to do with computers every day, the types of problems they are interested in solving."

In case anyone is curious, this one liner function gives you the absolute value of some 32-bit integer 'num':

"int myAbs(const int num) { return num < 0 ? (~num) + 1 : num; }"

There is another way: multiply the number by itself and return the square root of the multiplication (which will make it work with real numbers if you replace all instances of 'int' with 'double'). But the above code should suffice, given the requirement explicitly states 'some 32-bit signed integer'.

Computer Engineering/Computer Science graduates who don't understand why or how the above code works have wasted years of life studying a subject they're not even interested in.

Just out of curiosity, would this have been a valid option in your opinion ?

int absolute(const int num) { return (num>=0)?num:-num; }

That would pretty much have been my spontaneous answer to your problem (except with an if ... else structure instead of the trigraph).

And btw, both your solution and the solution I wrote in my original post have a bug, which I would've asked about, if he would've come up with something similar to mine or yours. But this follow-up question is only meant to test his mastery, which is not compulsory for the position he was being interviewed for. We don't want to assign maintenance works to someone who really masters his/her field -- such person deserves more challenging tasks.

Addendum: And btw, both your solution and the solution I wrote in my original post have a bug...

The bug is that none of the code is commented.

I'm basing this especially on "Computer Engineering/Computer Science graduates who don't understand why or how the above code works have wasted years of life studying a subject they're not even interested in" which implies that no one else is going to understand even this simple function.